


Remembering Pain

by Aaron_The_8th_Demon



Category: Alien Series
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2019-07-08 21:12:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15938384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaron_The_8th_Demon/pseuds/Aaron_The_8th_Demon
Summary: After the horrors of LV-426, the Weyland-Yutani company tries to "fix" things for themselves by torturing one of the survivors. It's quite literally the last mistake they ever make.





	Remembering Pain

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, another "Alien 3 didn't happen" fic. But this is also another one that popped in and made me write it, just like [Bitter Warmth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14743262) did that one time.
> 
> Mild content warning for some torture, but it's not overly graphic or long.

They’d said it was a debriefing.

It was really an interrogation.

Said interrogation wasn’t being conducted by the Corps, but rather by WeYu. After everything Ripley had said, Hicks guessed he should’ve expected this, but for some reason it took him by surprise. Or maybe the pain was making it harder for him to anticipate problems right now.

WeYu had guards, of course, in anonymous black combat armor with masks. Maybe they were mercenaries.

Mostly, though, Hicks was interested in how fucking _sick_ he was of re-answering - yes, Burke went missing during the skirmish; yes, Vasquez and Gorman were presumed dead before the reactor blew; yes, Hudson had been yanked down through the god damn floor and Hicks had been powerless to save him; yes, his grievous wounds were the result of direct, violent contact with one of the xenomorphs infesting the colony.

Hicks couldn’t see out his left eye because it was covered by bandages, but it wouldn’t have helped if he could. The mercenaries’ faces were obscured by black balaclavas and the WeYu agent was standing behind him. His arms were cuffed behind him and his feet were shackled to the legs of the chair. None of it was even necessary, seeing how he could barely sit up straight or walk without help. Maybe it was to make a bad scenario even more humiliating.

The whole situation was made even worse because it begged the question: _Where’s Ripley and Newt? What did these fuckers do to them?_

Hicks was all but physically dying to know the answer, but he wasn’t stupid enough to ask. In one uprising his unit had been sent to stamp out, anyone who protested against the idea of the revolt would often suffer indirectly when their families were tortured. All because they had quietly disagreed. If Hicks asked after Ripley and Newt, even in a non-aggressive way, this WeYu bastard and his cronies would draw the connection and then harm might come to the woman he had kind of a thing for… and equally horribly, to an innocent child, whose protection was not only his job but because he also just gave a shit what happened to Newt.

The thought was keeping him from breaking under the mental strain, from just telling them what they wanted to hear. They hadn’t physically done anything to Hicks, but psychology could be a powerful weapon. Simply not being able to see human faces, with only a cold and all-business voice perfectly out of his view, was sawing his nerves. But he had to get through it. He’d faced off against the fucking things on LV-426 and was still alive, if temporarily crippled, so he would get through the interrogation. After that, he would find Ripley and Newt… or, more likely, Ripley would probably show up any minute now to rescue _his_ sorry ass. That was just the kind of person she was.

Hicks was fine with that idea. Ripley was tougher than him and she wasn’t just going to sit around if she knew he was in trouble. Seeing how he wasn’t in fighting shape, it seemed a lot more likely than being able to find them himself, anyway.

These pricks were getting almost as sick of him as he was of them. They wanted him to say something, more specifically to say something that would incriminate himself, or Ripley, or someone who could be blamed that wasn’t Burke, because Burke had been one of them so of course he couldn’t be the scapegoat even though he was most certainly dead.

They asked him again. He repeated his answers and silently wondered how long they’ve been at this. He wouldn’t break. Hicks had never taken part in an interrogation personally - he was too low-ranking for that - but he understood how they worked. So he simply _refused_ to let them break him. He knew most of the tricks they would ultimately resort to. They wouldn’t have time for all of them, because Ripley would probably show up to kick ass and take names.

It dawned on him, suddenly, how much he was counting on being rescued, even though normally it was his job to save people. But Hicks also knew that he couldn’t hope for much else. Bound thoroughly the way he was, and injured to this extent, escape would be virtually impossible on his own.

Apparently the WeYu goons were impatient. They asked what he thought was coming next, and Hicks got sarcastic, because they’d been pissing him off. Were they going to keep after him in the same damn circle of questions?

The answer was no.

The bandage over his left arm was unwound - okay, he wasn’t expecting them to move on to that first. He’d thought maybe they’d try ordering him or threatening him or something, but nope. They went right for the “good stuff.”

The cold voice of the agent ordered one of the black-clothed mercenaries forward. A combat blade was produced, and just that first, lightest touch of the blunt edge made his ravaged nerves absolutely scream. Hicks felt his body seizing up in agony, then he slumped in the chair with a ragged, sucking breath. Hell, the chair was what kept holding him up. He immediately started begging a god he’d never believed in to please, please let him be right, let Ripley realize the trouble he was in and get him away from these fuckers.

Pain could break anyone.

But Hicks just had to keep it from breaking him for long enough.

There’d been other missions. He remembered those to keep him sane, as his battered body was put through a new round of torment. There’d been other missions where he’d been stuck someplace and needed an extraction. This wasn’t the first time. It may not even be the last. He focused on those memories, long-ago days when his unit hadn’t been obliterated by those fucking aliens, so that something would be in his brain besides his injuries.

At some point, his mind seemed to turn itself off, because the whole world for him became a haze with its noises muffled under a blanket. He thought someone might’ve been yelling at him. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell.

Hicks became lucid enough to understand - Ripley came for him after all. She was getting him free with a pair of bolt cutters. He needed to move, which meant leaning on her again, but he didn’t mind. The situation demanded it. He didn’t really know what was going on or how she’d gotten to him, but that didn’t matter much. Instead, as she’d hobbled him along, Hicks just murmured that he knew she’d come. Ripley smiled as she got him into some other chair, somewhere, and answered that Newt had said the same thing.

The fog returned after that. Blurs of sound and light and heat, then cold, then heat, then cold, like something inside his body couldn’t make up its mind what temperature he was. Pain. There was always pain.

Then, Hicks was dreaming.

He was lying on a bed, way nicer than anything in the service. Newt had stuffed herself into his armpit, hugging onto a brand-new teddy bear with a little blue ribbon bow-tied on its neck. Ripley was on the other side, just watching them both, because Newt was sleeping.

Then Ripley looked at him and smiled. She said Newt named the bear Hudson, because of course she did.

That was when Hicks realized that he was awake.

The little girl he’d tried to keep alive, not because it was his job but because he gave a shit, was snuggling up to his uninjured side and sleeping with a stuffed toy clutched to her chest. The woman he had kind of a thing for had gotten his sorry ass out, again, and was just there on his left, watching over them both.

Instead of questioning _any_ of this, Hicks groggily noticed the orange cat curled into a ball between him and Ripley, purring. He managed a weak grin and asked what she’d have done if he was allergic.

Ripley told him that his burns got infected after WeYu had tried torturing him into compliance. The company was crashing and burning, though, because even though the Bishop unit had been “found inoperable,” she’d known something like this might happen and had made backup copies of the data in triplicate. One copy was sent to the Corps, one sent to the press, the third to the government. There was no covering that up.

She also told him she had custody of Newt - it had been much less of an ordeal than she’d expected, but that might’ve been because she’d uncovered WeYu’s bioweapons scheme so people were suddenly interested in actually helping her get shit done that needed doing, now. They’d been waiting for Hicks’ fever to break so that they could share all this good news with him.

It was almost too much to take in, so instead of trying to process everything, Hicks asked just to make sure that this was great and all, but she knew he had kind of a thing for her, right? Because of all the faces he could’ve woke up to, he was glad it was hers. And Ripley just kept smiling at him and answered that yeah, of course she knew. Did he think he was subtle or something? Because he really hadn’t been, what with all the “helping her correctly position her arms” and shit when showing her his weapons. Hicks didn’t think he’d seen her smile like this - a real smile. Happiness. He liked it. It made him start smiling, even though there was still some pain in his shoulder and around his left eye.

That thought led to - he was seeing with both eyes. He almost hadn’t realized at first, but he was. Hicks asked about it. Apparently, this was actually a hospital, but it was way fucking nicer than any medical facility he’d seen before now. Again, this was probably because Ripley had made it that way. Because this was obviously not a hospital bed he was lying on; it was too big. A hospital bed wouldn’t fit two fairly tall adults, a seven-year-old, and a cat (at least, not comfortably).

The rest of the world trickled in throughout the day. Now that his fever broke, Hicks was getting some reconstructive surgery on his face tomorrow, to repair the damaged tissue around his eye. He would need skin grafts across his shoulder and arm, too, and then some physical therapy.

Newt was always in the room with them, playing with Jones or drawing pictures with crayons and always with Hudson-the-teddy-bear in tow. Hicks reasoned she’d named the toy that because Hudson had been the one who’d iced the face-grabbing-fingered thing that had gone after her in that medlab room.

Hicks was doomed to a supper of bad hospital food, including a fucking grape Jello cup for dessert (which was given to Newt because he hated Jello and hated fake grape flavoring even more). Over said bad hospital food, while Ripley was having something that looked much tastier, she informed him on no uncertain terms that if he was dense enough to think he’d been being subtle about flirting with her in a life-or-death situation, then he was probably also dense enough to not realize that she had kind of a thing for him, too.

Hicks laughed when she told him that, because she was right. He hadn’t been sure. Well, she told him, he was now. Would he like to come stay with her and Newt after he got out of the hospital? They had enough room. More than enough, actually.

Of course he would. Ripley and Newt were more than he deserved, but he wasn’t going to question things, even though it was a mission straight from Hell that had his life more or less looking brighter than it ever had before.

**Author's Note:**

> So, the thing where Newt names the teddy bear Hudson was not my idea. I borrowed it from [And We Move Forward](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3539183). But I thought it was so sad-cute that I just had to.
> 
> If you enjoyed this work, please feel free to check out my original WIP, [Nucleus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10027367).


End file.
